By: Kayleigh Zerrusen
Introduction
If you were to ask me to travel back to my first semester of college, I would give myself the advice to find a better way to study instead of just looking over notes that I copied and pasted from class. Most students will find themselves spending hours on end looking over notes and reading through textbooks. This tends to lead them to feel unprepared during exams and tests. Students think that this is caused from a lack of effort, but it could be the way your brain is processing information. An important idea from cognitive psychology that explains this issue is top-down processing. This process shows how knowledge that you have been taught previously and other experiences shape the way we comprehend and understand new information. Although top-down processing can be useful, there is also a possibility it can lead to misunderstanding when we study if it is not used the correct way.
